~ Taking Tea in the Kasbah

The Hilarity of the Missed Typo

In the spirit of the oh-so-careful editing we all do, I thought I would share this funny video by New York Times Bestselling YA author John Green. (For those of you who haven’t seen these vlogs before, John and his brother, Hank Green, post weekly fast-talking videos to each other on their vlogbrothers youtube channel about a variety of topics. You can read more about how their popular vlogs came about here.)

In this video, he starts off by sharing his excitement over his recently released book, The Fault in Our Stars (which is getting rave reviews – can’t wait to read it; it’s in the dangerously tottering TBR pile). Even though he is an accomplished author with several well-received books out there, I love how he seems to be just as thrilled about this one as he was about his first book.

He then goes on to point out what he believes to the be the Top 5 Typos Ever:

That was fun, Tami. Not sure it’s a good idea to discover more youtube distraction, but that is my issue, not yours, lol.

I know I’ve made some loo-loos but none come to mind other than the lame, nest instead of next, or writing fandy instead of fancy, as I did about 10 minutes ago in a FB post. At least with Twitter and FB you don’t spend months editing and sending out your comment for critiquing. When I received my first copy of my book in print, I refused to look for typos. I’m sure we didn’t catch everything, but I don’t want to know about them.

I know I’ve found some silly typos in my books. The only recent typo that comes to my mind, though, is one I read in Justin Cronin’s The Passage. Instead of a “loping gait,” one of the creatures came at a “loping gate.” This makes me giggle still.

Fun stuff. My usual experience when receiving the first author copy of one of my books back from the publisher is (a) Tear open packet in great excitement, (b) Gloat bit, (c) open the book, (d) Instantly spot a typo.

Over the years I’ve seen some doozies – in this day of auto-spell correct, usually changes made by the publisher’s proof-editing which create factual errors. The worst of iti s when these were made early enough in the process that I should have spotted them before signing off the proofs. Always a bit embarrassing and yet also kind of funny with hindsight. I just posted a few minutes ago about ‘industry standard’ proofing methods and why they still leak. The ultimate lesson is that authors are always going to be their own worst proof readers. You see what you want to see after a while.

Yep, missed typos. Several edits, a proof reading or two and when I finally held the hard copy of my first book, there it was. That danged typo was on the very first page. gahh
Life’s like that. tee hee

I can’t name names, but: I know a guy who once sent out about 165 resumes to various companies. He was asked for an interview by a CEO. He showed up for the interview and sat down with the CEO…to whom he posed the question, “Do you always interviews candidates personally?”
The CEO responded: “No. But I’ve never met anyone with your experience in Pubic Radio before.”